


crocus and narcissus

by 2x2verse (agent_florida)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Coming Out, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-09
Updated: 2015-08-09
Packaged: 2018-04-13 20:59:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4537107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agent_florida/pseuds/2x2verse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><strong>crocus</strong><br/>[kroh-kuh s] <em>noun</em><br/>any of the small, bulbous plants of the genus Crocus, of the iris family, cultivated for their showy, solitary flowers, which are among the first to bloom in the spring.</p>
            </blockquote>





	crocus and narcissus

You are hopelessly tangled in red string.

Kankri, of course, is an irresponsible martyr and somehow allowed his first sweater from you to become marled and pulled. You know he didn’t launder it correctly because it’s felted and faded. It’s like he enjoys putting you through all this work just to make sure he’s not quite so insufferable. Why, if you didn’t know better, and you’re not sure you do, you’d think he was angling in on one of your quadrants.

Not pale. Pitch. With the absolutely _delightful_ commentary about your concupiscent situation and his insistence that he’s only chaste relative to you, it might actually be brazen black flirtation at this point. It only makes you knit faster, and faster, until your needles clack like the friction could set your hive ablaze. He talks too much, for one. And he talks about the wrong things, for another. How dare he call your valid social commentary a pet project.

Knocking starts at your hive door and doesn’t abate until you count nine raps. Of course. His quirk. “If you must,” you call out. It’s not locked; you were expecting him.

You weren’t expecting the seadweller draped off his arm.

Cronus looks… different. Well, you always try not to look at him too closely, but his silhouette doesn’t match what you remember. He’s so thin you swear you can see his gills under the stretch-tight of his cotton shirt. And his hair looks even more foppish than usual, like he’s growing it out. Of course, some things never change: the skinny jeans, the pristine ear fins, the soggy fag hanging out the corner of his mouth. He’s got his arm draped around Kankri’s shoulders and you can feel your eyes light on fire. He has no right to be touching him like that, you know Kankri hates being touched, why is Kankri allowing this?

“Well, well.” There’s a slight warble on the Ws, his quirk made flesh. “What have we here? Kan, I think Por’s makin’ you a new sweater.”

“I won’t stand for him shivering when he could just wear a damn shirt and be happy as a clam.” And if he’d act like a clam and shut it for once in his life. You’ve tuned him out by now, but you think he’s still blathering on in the background vaguely—you can see his mouth moving up and down.

“See? Told ya we’d get along, she’s speakin’ my language!” Cronus takes back his arm, but only to elbow Kankri jocularly in the side.

Kankri stops nattering, palms at the place where Cronus jabbed him. “Yes, yes, I’m glad that _you_ can admit that I can be right about things.” You ignore the glare pointed at you. “In any case, I’m afraid I’m no longer required, as I’m not qualified to talk about Porrim’s pet projects of purple-down patriarchy and caste discrimination. I’m sure the two of you will have a lot of problematics to discuss, but if you need to ask for lectures—advice! I mean advice—on your specific intersection of identities, you know where to find me.” And with that, the little shit bows out of the conversation, waves you good morning, and leaves. Shuts the door.

You are now alone with a troll you’ve perhaps spoken to a grand half-dozen times in your entire life. Including the span where you were all dead for several thousand sweeps.

Cronus shifts on his feet. It’s obvious to you that he’s just as uncomfortable about this as you are. “Well?” you draw out, arching a pierced eyebrow at him. Your needles go clack-clack.

“Can I, uh.” He gestures vaguely in the direction of a sit slat.

You shrug. “Can you?” Clack-clack, turn for a particularly difficult pick-up of stitches.

He goes ahead and takes a seat, perching on it awkwardly. He doesn’t seem to know how to cross his legs. Eventually he settles on crossing them at the knee. “Sorry if we were interrupting. Kan must ‘a thought he was invited.”

“He was. You weren’t.” You give him a once-over while your hands are on autopilot. “So, why did he think you’d want to talk to _me_? Wouldn’t you rather he deafened you first with his endless lectures on the holy annals of problematics?”

Cronus rolls his eyes. They’re lovely eyes, filled in with delicate violet. They also set your teeth on edge, because they represent part of what is wrong with Beforan society as a whole. “I’d rather not, he’s talking out his ass half the time. And he said you knew more about the, uh. Feminism stuff than he did. Called it stupid.”

“He always does.” You’re interested now. A violetblood comes to you voluntarily and wants to talk about the violence inherent in the system? Of course you’re all ears. “What, particularly, did you want to talk about?”

“I, uh.” He’s looking towards the door. His hands—long, thin, delicately jeweled with filigrees of gold inlaid in his claws—hook against each other in his lap. “I wanted to talk to him about a thing, my humankin thing, but I, well, I realized somethin’ about it and it’s got less to do with that and more to do with—“

“Cronus.” You have little patience for longer-lived seadwellers who think they can take up your precious time just by existing. “Get to the point.”

“I think I’m a girl,” Cronus says, voice cracking in the middle.

The words lay there for a moment. Syrupy-thick, deceptively sweet and yet broken. Those violet eyes peer at you as if you have answers. You put down your knitting, look Cronus over more carefully. The hair curled behind his fins—the waspish shape of his waist now that he’s thinner than he ever was—the odd mannerisms at just being told to take a seat already—hm. “I see.” You don’t. Not yet. You’re hoping he can explain. “And you wanted to tell me because...?”

“You know the most about what it’s like,” he says. (He? She? Pronoun preferences. Soon. Not right now. Explanation now. Pronouns later.) “The way it just crushes your soul inside-out every day, wakin’ up knowin’ there’s a wide world out there that thinks it’s over all the misogynistic shit just because some glubbin’ bitch is Empress and we all got hatched from a goddamn grub—“

“Cronus, the first step in having it not crush your soul is not to call women bitches for existing.” You’re explaining it like you’d teach it to a grub, barely out of the caves. This one needs some remedial lessons.

“Sorry, sorry.” He huffs a deep breath, compulsively tucks his hair behind his ear. His fins and gills flutter when he breathes. Interesting. “It’s just. That purple-down patriarchy, right?”

“Yes,” you tell him. _The patriarchy that you participate in and benefit from_ , you don’t tell him. “How did you know about that theory?”

“I’ve been doing my research.” Somehow Cronus has the ability to look both shy and proud all at once when he says it. “I was—okay, has Kankri told you about the other thing?”

“The human 1950s greaser thing?”

“That thing.” He smiles with shark’s teeth. “It was—just readin’ up on it made me feel like I had discovered this whole new world—I mean, I had, totally different planet and everything! And Travolta Human John, he just. Troll Grease was never like that, I swear, and then I see all these images, I hear all these things, and I just—I knew, Por, that’s where I belonged. Back there. And I can’t get there. I can’t go back in time, I can’t go to another planet. And it hurts me right in the vascular to know I can’t ever be who I really am.”

“And that taught you about Beforan casteist patriarchy how, exactly?”

“I’m gettin’ there, don’t cuss me out yet.” The more he talks, the more he flushes, high and cold on his arched regal cheekbones; you want to trace each bloodpoint freckle across the bridge of his sniffnode with your tongue. “I mean, realizin’ I was really human under all the troll barnacle pretty much changed my life. And it made me start wonderin’ if everythin’ else was the same as I thought or whether it was different all the way down. Tryin’ to get in touch with the human part of me was hard enough but—listen, I didn’t like the guy I was startin’ to be, ok? I wasn’t bein’ the kinda troll John Travolta knew I could be. The kinda human—the kinda person, yeah, just in general.

“And I started, y’know, tracin’ it back. And there’s all this—stuff, this cultural stuff that started just after the Earth ‘50s, and it totally blindsided me, but I think it’s ‘cause I’m growin’ up. Five sweeps older, totally different decade here too, and I just. I wanted to move into the ‘60s with my life, and then I started seein’ all this—this women’s lib, and this whole thing of men, men are bad, men are the oppressor, all this shit—“

If it turns out this dunderfuck is identifying as female because of internalized sexism you are going to shit an entire lusus egg. “You do know a lot of that’s all talk and no action, right? That there’s a difference between the types of things you see in academia and the types of things you see in real life?”

“Yeah, but.” He makes an irritated rasp-growl-purr noise; his throat-gills flutter. “All the kinda behaviors they were talkin’ about, that’s all shit I did. And I did it because I thought I had to. That—swagger, y’know? Fake it ‘til ya make it.”

“Performing masculinity in itself isn’t toxic,” you point out.

“Yeah, but.” He looks down, to his hands. “The way I was doin’ it—guys, y’know, guys don’t have feelin’s, they don’t have emotions. Felt like… felt like there was just this wall. I didn’t have a way to _connect_ , couldn’t _feel_ , couldn’t _touch_ , so that’s what everythin’ turned into, try’na reach out ‘n _touch_.” Up, back to you, and is it just you or are his violet eyes just that little bit more saturated? “I ain’t proud’a what I did, Por. I—I thought that’s what guys did. Just took what they wanted ‘n fuck the rest. What I did to ‘Tuna—fuck, he shoulda fried me alive, callin’ him names just ‘cause he went all weird after what he did, ‘n’ when I…” He’s pulling at his right hand with his left, like he could separate his prongs from his limb if he tried hard enough.

Yes. That. You wondered if he was going to acknowledge that. Talked about killing him, Meenah said. Latula told you how fucked up Mituna went over it, whatever it was. “You…” This is difficult for you to parse. “You did all that because—because you thought that’s what men are supposed to do?”

“What fuckin’ kinda role models did I have, Por?” He counts them off on his fingers. “Some dead failure of an ancestor, pretendin’ to be a wizard when magic ain’t even real. Another dead failure of an ancestor, slaver on the high seas—bassholes, Por, both of ‘em.”

“I don’t disagree,” you say mildly. He’s tugging at genetic memories that by rights ought to be left untouched. It’s difficult for you right now to keep from luminating or baring your fangs. Deep breath—flare of sniffnodes, fill your chest, then out, slow. The room isn’t quite so bright now. “What about Travolta Human John?”

“Okay.” Cronus folds his fingers away, twists his hands in on themselves again. “Okay. Him. Here’s where nothin’ makes sense. ‘Cause John Travolta, he likes this girl, right? Olivia Newton-John. Call her Sandy. And they fall in flush, and they talk about it with their friends, and—they just, they talked so different about it, and when I fall in flush with somebody I didn’t want to be like Travolta, I wanted to be like Olivia, I wanted that.”

It spills out so fast it all slurs together. When it’s done, the room goes silent. The words stain the space between. Clack-clack go your needles. You hum a little to yourself.

“Gods’ sake, Por, say somethin’,” Cronus says, voice small.

Yes, you really ought to. But what? There’s something fragile hanging here and you don’t want to crush it. Probably best if it’s some sort of question. “So you think you’d be happier if people saw you as being like Olivia?” That’s social dysphoria, at the very least.

“I don’t know if that’d be enough—“ And then Cronus bites his lip. Hard, bruised violet already rising to the surface.

Lord, if you knew his lips would be that pretty when they were bitten you’d have done it ages ago. “What else is it?”

“The, the—“ He makes a fluid gesture, hands passing down his body. “This.”

Physical dysphoria, too. You really shouldn’t pry, but—“What’s wrong with it?”

“I—I don’t have _curves_ , I can’t make ‘em come out no matter how skinny I go—“the skeletal appearance, the exaggerated tuck of his waist—“and then human girls, they got these things—breasts, Por, not just flat-lookin’ rumblespheres but full womanly _breasts_ , my chest feels heavy just thinkin’ about ‘em—and I, they, human girls don’t have these shallow little nooks and these—god, they’d think they’re just tentacles tacked on, but they, it’s so _pretty_ , I can’t even describe—like that fragile bit just inside a clam, all wet pink folds, and I’ll never—I won’t ever look like—“

You can see his gills flaring under his shirt, it’s so tight and he’s so thin. “Cronus—Cronus, calm down, are you sure it’s human you want and not—“

“I’m sure,” he snarls, and his voice is laced with subsonic threats he probably doesn’t mean but come so easily to him—subconscious casteism, perhaps.

“I only asked because, well—“ Has he even seen yonic troll genitals? Not so different from yonic human genitals, really—and you would know, not only have you discussed this thoroughly with your dancestor but you’ve also done your own extracurricular research. As it were. The same sorts of wet folds, but dyed with the owner’s caste, and initially set behind a pair of beetle-like wings to protect them from misaimed not-so-caliginous-after-all violence. Ignoring the small detail that the clitoris analog is a full two inches long and whips around like a miniature bulge, Cronus might be happy with that—and it’s something troll science can actually achieve, so perfectly that Cronus might believe in magic again.

Cronus actually _glubs_ , the sound rending your pusher. “I don’t want this caste, Por, I never asked for it, you’ve seen what I’ve done with it and it ain’t good, none of it—I just want to be soft and fleshy and pale and pink and curvy and _weak_ , let me have this!”

Your needles slow. Stop. You set aside Kankri’s half-finished sweater. Cronus puts his head in his hands; his shoulders heave, once, twice, then shiver in place. Sufferer’s Disciple, are you ever a bitch. Were it anyone but Cronus you wouldn’t doubt this conclusion, you would just support your friend. Why did you test him? Why did you push him this far? Because you didn’t believe him? Why should that matter? Even if he changes his mind, broadening his horizons would never hurt him.

You reach out, put a hand on his shoulder, and Cronus stills. When you speak next, you keep your voice calm, soothing, somewhere in the warm tones of the moirail register but not tipping quite so far into that quadrant. You crossed a line. “I’m sorry.” You were wrong, and so Cronus deserved an apology. “I just don’t know what to do, now.”

“You think I have a fuckin’ clue?” comes out muffled, Cronus speaking into his lap.

“No, I mean…” While you try to gather your words, you soothe Cronus by rubbing a small circle into his shoulder with your thumb. His skin is so cold compared to yours. What a difference his caste makes. “What should I call you, what pronouns should I use, what… what can I do? For you?”

Cronus lets out a long breath, half-sigh and half-shudder. “I—I kinda…” He raises his head, looks at you. “I’m not ready to tell other people yet. It was so hard just to tell you—it’ll be our secret, okay, just you ‘n’ me.”

“That’s all right.” People can take their own speeds in how fast they want to step out of the closet, and you want Cronus to feel safe in this. If you can be his safety, so be it. “So, when I’m talking about you to other people, I can still use Cronus and call you ‘he’ and you’ll be okay?”

A wan smile makes Cronus show a few fangs. “I’ll manage. I ain’t gonna dry up just ‘cause you gotta keep actin’ like everything’s like it was.”

“Good,” you tell him, voice rasping on something too close to a moirail’s purr of reassurance. All you can hope is that he won’t misinterpret this for a genuine pale dalliance—you don’t want to pull Cronus into the revolving doors of your quadrants without his enthusiastic consent. “But—when it’s just us? Just you and me?”

The smile firms into a grin. Something like hope. You haven’t seen this on his face in a long time; his aspect looks so at home in his countenance. “I want to be—just gimme a place where I can be _me_ , all right, that’s all I’m askin’ for.”

You can understand that. You take back your hand, but smooth down his— _her_ , her her her—arm as you go. “So what should I call you, Miss Ampora?”

Yes, that’s hope—bright and true. “Crocus,” she says, voice practiced but yet still soft and light. “Call me Crocus.”


End file.
